Average Rating

User Reviews

This season may come off to a slow start, but soon tenseness is built up and matches soon begin. New supernatural powers and beings are showing off in mahjong, and it's one hell of a ride! I wonder how Saki will react when she finally faces her sister.

Even though I'm still learning the basics of mahjong, Saki manages to help me out and amaze me at the same time. Apparently, I don't have godly powers and I'm not "loved by the tiles", but hey, that's what makes this show very entertaining! I really like how they switch the POV to Saki's opponents so you understand their stories and end up liking every one of her and her team's opponents, despite
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Even though I'm still learning the basics of mahjong, Saki manages to help me out and amaze me at the same time. Apparently, I don't have godly powers and I'm not "loved by the tiles", but hey, that's what makes this show very entertaining! I really like how they switch the POV to Saki's opponents so you understand their stories and end up liking every one of her and her team's opponents, despite wanting them to lose lol.

It's a nice story in the sense that Saki is making her way up to finally meet her sister and play with the big guns at Nationals. You see every character really growing and progressing in themselves and in their game play as the episodes move forward.

I love the battle music and the anticipation I feel when watching a game. All in all, a very exciting and fun anime to watch and cheer for.

This is my first attempt at writing a review for anime so please take that into consideration. Here are a few of my biases you should know about before reading however: I like original art work. things that stand out. Even being a straight male I find girl love animes annoying and forced. I like Slice of Life, Horror, and occult animes the best. I'm going to Judge this on 3 categories Story,
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This is my first attempt at writing a review for anime so please take that into consideration. Here are a few of my biases you should know about before reading however: I like original art work. things that stand out. Even being a straight male I find girl love animes annoying and forced. I like Slice of Life, Horror, and occult animes the best. I'm going to Judge this on 3 categories Story, Style, and watch-ability. I like these three because it makes it easy to know what you're getting into. Story will give you a hint on what to expect while watching, style explains art/music direction, and watch-ability expresses how easy it was to get drawn into it. I also weigh watch-ability the highest of the 3. It doesn't matter how great of a story you have or how good your art is if you can't get anyone to watch it and I used that thinking to get the overall score. So without further adieu lets get into more detail.

Story:
1/5

This anime holds no punches and shows you exactly what its going to be, an over the top unrealistic adaptation of mahjong spiced with a whole bunch of magic. Not to mention the in your face girl crushes every character in this series has apart from the mascot character Yuuki who flaunts her child like body and sexual advances at the boring and frankly waste of screen time token male character Suga who's only character traits are his perverted love of women and being bad at mahjong.
They start off the anime getting almost directly into mahjong with the no idea whats going on or who the characters are. All you know it that Saki hates mahjong. From watching the first episode you learn that our protagonist Saki a girl who is magically imbued with the ability to play mahjong better than anyone else even though she hasn't touched a board in years and hates the game. Other than her amazing skill at mahjong and blatant sexual tension towards Nodoka (Another member of the mahjong club) has no interesting back story and even less character development and it is only used as a macguffin to move the already monotonously slow anime forward. Speaking of fleshing out characters let me explain how they do that. Every single time a new character is introduced you will receive a minimum 5-7 minute flash back that sums up their personality and the relationships they have with the people around them. That in itself wouldn't be the worst thing in the world but the tend to introduce 5 characters at a time making it very tedious to watch.on top of that to save money and use up screen time they constantly return to have us re-watch those exact same flash backs over and over again. The story has no redeeming qualities.

Style:
3/5

This anime is bland. Its art direction does nothing at all to have it stand out of the crowd. From the characters to the setting everything is ordinary. It is also doesn't follow a coloring rule with the mahjong pieces with annoys me to no end. one second they're using blue topped pieces and in the next scene they're using gold. The soundtrack is forgettable i make a habit of watching the opening and closing of every anime at least once and then every time a new one is shown. They're all meh. the soundtrack during the scenes can be counted as decent because it doesn't detract but it never adds anything either.

Watch-ability
5/5

This anime is stupidly campy. Sometimes so over the top its embarrassing. From the way the characters interact to the consistent racial ignorance of Yuuki with her tacos, to the careful way the director chose to show the Mahjong games it all come together to make something greater than its parts. This anime is cringe worthy. Nothing about it stands out except in how bad it is but its the kind of bad that makes you wanna keep watching like a bad horror movie or a train wreck you know its bad but you can't look away. This anime is definitely worth a watch but its not nearly as good as other board game based anime (Hikaru no Go comes to mind). Overall this is a very easy to get sucked into anime that I had trouble walking away from.

Every single character in this show has got a personality, even the people doing the announcements in the booth. This is the redeeming feature of this strangely odd anime, Mahjong itself is a great game to play but.. this anime focuses more on the characters and jokes and bits of drama rather then any true focus on Mahjong itself. Then they cover this fact up by sugar-coating the scenes with
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Every single character in this show has got a personality, even the people doing the announcements in the booth. This is the redeeming feature of this strangely odd anime, Mahjong itself is a great game to play but.. this anime focuses more on the characters and jokes and bits of drama rather then any true focus on Mahjong itself. Then they cover this fact up by sugar-coating the scenes with powers and auras and peoples reactions to things. (Although i admit the reactions they have are very good) This second season is.. about the same as the previous one, one character has uber powers and automatically defeats everyone else. Therefore i give this anime 4/10, its a poorly written story.. don't watch this if you want to see decent Mahjong plays as they just dramatically place tiles out of the air in this one and call it "skill".

I am not a professional reviewer (i don't know if anyone is) but the reason i sat down and watched Saki was because it was about the game Majong. I thought "There's no way they actually did this," and boy was i wrong. Saki is the story of a Mojang club that shoot for the nationals (the simplest way to put it). If you haven't watched Saki i HIGHLY recommend watching it.

This review is only for the first season of Saki. I've come back to this series numerous times already and it's been way too long since I last watched it. I remember about 2-3 years back when Saki was first being uploaded to CR and they were doing some promo thing where you watch an episode and collect mahjong tiles. I didn't watch anime as much at that time anymore but this anime really sucked me
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This review is only for the first season of Saki. I've come back to this series numerous times already and it's been way too long since I last watched it. I remember about 2-3 years back when Saki was first being uploaded to CR and they were doing some promo thing where you watch an episode and collect mahjong tiles. I didn't watch anime as much at that time anymore but this anime really sucked me in. Every time I come back to this, the first episode just really pumps me up and I can't help but feel ecstatic, excited for the fun of this lovely mahjong club! The center being one little unknown school that rises to the top because of their talented mahjong players with the passion for mahjong. I was terribly disappointed that the second season was not coming anytime soon when I first watched it but I'm now glad to see that the full season 2 is up. Also the music really sucks in the viewer. This is only regarding the first season again. However I think the subtle shoujo ai is a little annoying here and there. It's plays on the border between genuine girl friendship and actual girlfriends.But then again, it helps wtih the whole trying hard to work together to get the nationals.

TO the criticism of Akri7-Zer0 and IgnatiusSp
I'm not so sure it's such a bad idea for this anime to have "dumbed" it down or to be more about the characters than the mind sport. For one, Japanese Mahjong is different from Chinese Mahjong (which I'm sure people know that) and I think not many know japanese mahjong either (more known and popular in japan of course giving that it is "japanese mahjong"). This anime could not only be a way to rally the youth in Asia to be more interested in the competitiveness of cultural sports of the mind like Mahjong (one way I like to think about this anime) but also to simply introduce the audience to another version of mahjong. I find Chinese (Cantonese) Mahjong is much easier but this sparked interest in the Japanese version for me. I also read through someone's review which noted how the translation is poor in the japanese mahjong terminology since it likely referenced EUROPEAN Mahjong (there are so many versions out there) hence it's quite confusing to watch from this and learn anyways. All in all, in a more analytical view of this anime, despite "dumbed down" and being more about the characters than mahjong, I think it's safe to say that one of the goals was its "Moe-ness" to attract viewers to be interested in specifically Japanese Mahjong since it is less widely known. (I can say that Shion no Ou is similar to this in that it was more character focused (and melodramatic with the unsolved crime) than Shoji too).

Did a pervert write this? It's written like a kids anime so why all the ass shots and boob nonsense? And, not that I have a problem with lesbians, but the amount of lesbian like behavior and lack of male roles furthers my opinion that this was written by a pervert. Other than that...it was mostly enjoyable, however, I found the introduction of supernatural crap in the second season very annoying
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Did a pervert write this? It's written like a kids anime so why all the ass shots and boob nonsense? And, not that I have a problem with lesbians, but the amount of lesbian like behavior and lack of male roles furthers my opinion that this was written by a pervert. Other than that...it was mostly enjoyable, however, I found the introduction of supernatural crap in the second season very annoying and out of character of the first season. On top of that every single new character just had to get their own back story and flashback making it feel like it was really dragging on. If you're bored and out of animes to watch like I was, it's worth a watch...I guess.

I read the manga before Saki was animated, and the story blew my mind. A girl with exceptional mahjong skills, hates the game because of her upbringing. However, Saki decides to join her high school mahjong team and become champion at the national tournament. Its the first Mahjong manga/anime that intentionally didnt focus on game elements like cheating, tobacco use, gambling for life, and girls
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I read the manga before Saki was animated, and the story blew my mind. A girl with exceptional mahjong skills, hates the game because of her upbringing. However, Saki decides to join her high school mahjong team and become champion at the national tournament. Its the first Mahjong manga/anime that intentionally didnt focus on game elements like cheating, tobacco use, gambling for life, and girls stripping due to loss at mahjong game.

Im not personally fond of the first season translation because Japanese Reach Mahjong Rule number 1 is to not say Pung, Chow, Kong, and mahjong (instead of Pon, Chi, Kan, Tsumo, and Ron). however, its subtitle is translated that wrong way... besides that, the Anime is awesome!

At face value, this is a generic sports anime. We know them, we love them, with all the cliches and tropes that define the genre. Where it goes off kilter is that most sports anime portray the sports they are based around reasonably well, even while taking liberties for the sake of drama. This one... well.. doesn't.

It's okay that mah jong is ultimately a game of luck, and it's okay that the
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At face value, this is a generic sports anime. We know them, we love them, with all the cliches and tropes that define the genre. Where it goes off kilter is that most sports anime portray the sports they are based around reasonably well, even while taking liberties for the sake of drama. This one... well.. doesn't.

It's okay that mah jong is ultimately a game of luck, and it's okay that the Japanese often treat luck as some kind of personal trait, but Saki goes far overboard, with ridiculous instances of repeating luck and, in the latter half, downright magic with curses and blessings and weird X-men stuff. While Hikaru no Go had supernatural elements, the game had to be won by, actually, winning the game via superior technique. Here, the portrayal of the game itself suffers - sometimes I got the feeling that the writer had no idea how to write about mah jong.

You CAN write luck well. Just check out any movie about poker players (the 1994 western Maverick does it awesome), or the "good" mah jong anime, Akagi (which does it awesomely, while actually portraying the game without cheap copouts). So yea. Watch this for high school weird slice-of-life laughs (too weird for me), or for the sheer weird of it (eep), if you want, but if you're interested in an anime about mah jong, just watch Akagi.

Well i watch this a few times took me awhile to realize they don't wear underclothing not even bra's which is odd, but either way the anime dose a good job not showing to much every now and then you can catch something, but mostly not. Anyways the show is good although I wish they would show a more powered up Saki i mean she just looks normal for the most part but i guess it depends who is looking
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Well i watch this a few times took me awhile to realize they don't wear underclothing not even bra's which is odd, but either way the anime dose a good job not showing to much every now and then you can catch something, but mostly not. Anyways the show is good although I wish they would show a more powered up Saki i mean she just looks normal for the most part but i guess it depends who is looking at her. Anyways hope there is more to look forward to in this show. Can't wait until the next anime comes hopefully soon, but doubt that as manga is to slow in release. Anyways not a bad show pretty decent.

About the Show

Saki tells the story of a girl's mental and emotional growth as she and her fellow teammates battle fearsome rivals, all gunning for the national
Saki tells the story of a girl's mental and emotional growth as she and her fellow teammates battle fearsome rivals, all gunning for the national high school mahjong tournament, and is a cross between sports action and high school drama.
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